There is a moonlit madness to Laurie Anderson's latest music-theatre piece. It might be taking place within the mind of an insomniac, who helplessly contemplates ancestry and the afterlife, Kierkegaard and Melville, politics and passwords, before finally drifting off into a restless sleep disturbed by weird dreams. In one recent dream, Anderson recounts, she arranged for her pet dog to be stitched inside her stomach, so that she could give birth to it. How vividly she remembers it squirming.

Constructed as a series of short stories, Delusion is in part a meditation on the art of storytelling, and the way humans use language to create the world around them. This isn't a new thought, but Anderson renders it affectingly personal, not least when she muses on the death of her mother last year, and recalls how "her last words were scattered".

Ranging from quizzical to sorrowful to wry, Anderson's stories feel at once diffuse and acute, meandering across thoughts and images, then pulling up sharp with an acerbic epigram. The soundtrack has this energy, too: swathes of the evening are underscored by abstract murmurs from Anderson's synthesiser, but when you least expect it she will play a wonderful, slanted melody on her violin, or croon a mystified rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. As it ends, each story is submerged in cacophony by Colin Stetson on bass saxophone and Eyvind Kang on viola, with Anderson's words lost not to death but to the exhilaration of noise.

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